Mark Rydell (far right) strips in Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE, doing pre-emptive penance to Elliott Gould (second right) for directing him in HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK.

It’s worth watching young Arnie Schwartzenegger (second left, with bum-fluff moustache) in this scene — while the other thugs register surprise and reluctance at being ordered to denude by their boss, Ahnoldt can’t wait — he’s eager to go, unbuttoning almost before the words are out of Rydell’s mouth — it’s what he took the job for in the first place. Be a gangster’s bodyguard and expose your pecs.

I’m just reading some early Raymond Chandler stories (and Fiona is reading Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest — it’s a hardboiled household). I really feel that Pearls are a Nuisance ought to be a Major Motion Picture, possibly by the Coen Brothers, possibly starring Armie Hammer. There’s some comic dialogue in there worthy of Sturges.

“Drunk, Walter?” he boomed. “Did I hear you say drunk? An Eichelberger drunk? Listen, son. We ain’t got a lot of time now. It would take maybe three months. Some day when you got three months and maybe five thousand gallons of whiskey and a funnel, I would be glad to take my own time and show you what an Eichelberger looks like when drunk. You wouldn’t believe it. Son, there wouldn’t be nothing of this town but a few sprung girders and a lot of busted bricks, in the middle of which–Geez, I’ll get talking English myself if I hang around you much longer–in the middle of which, peaceful, with no human life nearer than maybe fifty miles. Henry Eichelberger will be on his back smiling at the sun. Drunk, Walter. Not stinking drunk, not even country-club drunk. But you could use the word drunk and I wouldn’t take no offense.”

Via La Faustin — an image which gives the lie to Gould’s too-hasty statement — George Raft with his clothes off. Source?

The snow and ice out there looked so nice I sent the late William Fraker out to take some snaps of it before it all melts.

Not really, of course. The images are from the opening titles of THE FOX, a DH Lawrence story filmed by Mark Rydell, screenplay by John Lewis Carlino and Howard Koch. Fraker shot it, and it’s visually stunning.

I do tend to find Lawrence rather a load of tosh, but that’s because I’m inclined to find things funny where possible. Lawrence requires you to not do that, I think. In a way, John Boorman might have been a better match for him than Ken Russell, since Boorman similarly defies humour. I mean, I don’t deny that some woman, some time, may have stared into an icy pond and clasped her own breasts, but I can’t imagine she’d have done it with the earnestness and deep meaning suggested here.

Still, the movie has Sandy Dennis, that wonderful, uncontrolled presence, and is supported at either end by the cheekbones of Keir Dullea and Anne Heywood. One of them has a very attractive bob but I won’t spoil it by revealing which.

Koch, of course, had a hand in everything from CASABLANCA to LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN to Welles’s War of the Worlds. Carlino is known to me mainly for the chilling SECONDS. Here’s how his draft of the script for THE FOX begins —

FADE IN

EXTERIOR FARM AND FIELDS DAWN

It is dawn. The sun is just peeping over the trees, tinting the snow a faint pink. Fog and mist blend the shapes of trees with the whiteness so that all seems to have an amorphic unreality. There are no outlines, only dark shapes, emerging, blending, merging again. All is silent. There is no wind. Now as the sun moves higher, the mist and fog begins to burn off and shapes begin to define themselves. Thin fibril branches of trees and bushes, sheathed in ice, glistening against the sun. The fantastic geometric patterns of frost. The frozen ripples at the edge of a brook. The nimbus of gossamer-like cocoons and webs, flashing, crystalline, like spun glass. Everything is arrested, balanced, composed.

Incredible as it seems, Fraker manages to get 90% of that up on the screen, and more beautifully than Carlino’s prose can suggest. In particular, the image above revolves from hazy silhouette to solid, detailed form, perhaps in part due to Fraker creeping the shutter open to lighten the image, or maybe it’s a completely genuine Canadian sunrise, I don’t know…